For the record, I woke up within 30 seconds of the alarm 27 out of 34 times. It was pretty exhausting at the start but it got easier towards the end. Some days I woke up before the alarm. My body clock adjusted to expect 8 (ish) hours of sleep a night.

Evolution of the Sleep Challenge Spreadsheet: Written by Andrew

Week 1 – Wanting a way to easily streamline the updating and cross-monitoring, we set up this online shared spreadsheet system. Week 2 – To streamline efforts and increase success chance, we ended up making our new habits identical. Same goals and targets. Week 3 – To increase motivation, we implemented a scoring system against each other. Winner gets food/money/clean-clothes. Week 4 – We combined the scoring system to a joint scoring system. We only get a joint point if we BOTH wake up within thirty seconds, but no points at all if either one of us fails to wake up in time. Thus we will put more importance on encouraging the other person to wake up, and also increased motivation from not wanting to make the team fail.

Some pointers

Nothing like public shame as a motivation.

Andrew and I changed from a competitive to a co-operative scoring system halfway though. However, this was less of a motivation. Also, there was an incentive to be dishonest so that the other side wasn’t let down.

Ultimately, we would only deceive ourselves if we cheated on the sleep challenge.

I immediately went back to the pattern of snoozing when the challenge ended.